"Ray" <bear@sonic.net> wrote in message news:10-02-060@comp.compilers...> There has been a lot of research on Link grammars for natural language> processing. They do pretty well, and link failures (grammar doesn't> match input) seem well-correlated to very specific error conditions.>> So it occurred to me to wonder whether anyone's using them for> programming language development? Or, specifically, whether there> are any tools similar in spirit to Lex/Yacc/etc that use link> grammars rather than production grammars?

I am not personally aware of any languages using them.

the issue WRT link grammars is that they would likely have a notable impact
on the language syntax, and so to use this sort of grammar in the design of
a programming language would, likely, involve having to re-imagine many of
the basic syntactic forms. this could also potentially impact the semantics
as well.

I have doubts it would be a good match for existing common programming
languages (such as the C-family, for example), but then again, not having
much experience with the grammars I could be wrong.

as for myself, actually, I have not really seen or worked with these
grammars.

I had done some things related to parsing English, but this had approached
things from a different stance:
I had essentially tried to "mechanize" the English, mostly by limiting the
number of valid syntactic constructions, enforcing a "one word, one grammar
type" rule, and by attempting to use a recursive descent parser.

however, what became a problem here was that I couldn't come up with a good
semantic model, and didn't have a particular use-case, which sort of limited
the point of parsing it for my uses.

some of my other uses of natural language typically didn't require full
parsers.